The King of Arcadia

"All right; if it's the thing you want to do," Ballard yielded. "Of course, I shall be delighted to have you along." And when Fitzpatrick came with two horses he sent him back to the corral for a third.

The preparations for the night ride were soon made, and it was not until Ballard and Bigelow were making ready to mount at the door of the commissary that Fitzpatrick reappeared with the guide, a grave-faced lad who looked as if he might be years older than any guess his diminutive stature warranted. Ballard's glance was an eye-sweep of shrewd appraisal.

"You're not much bigger than a pint of cider, Dickie boy," he commented. "Why don't you take a start and grow some?"

"I'm layin' off to; when I get time. Pap allows I got to'r he won't own to me," said the boy soberly.

"Who is your father?" The query was a mere fill-in, bridging the momentary pause while Ballard was inspecting the saddle cinchings of the horse he was to ride; and evidently the boy so regarded it.

"He's a man," he answered briefly, adding nothing to the supposable fact.

Bigelow was up, and Ballard was putting a leg over his wiry little mount when Fitzpatrick emerged from the dimly lighted interior of the commissary bearing arms – a pair of short-barrelled repeating rifles in saddle-holsters.

"Better be slinging these under the stirrup-leathers – you and your friend, Mr. Ballard," he suggested. "All sorts of things are liable to get up in the tall hills when a man hasn't got a gun."

This was so patently said for the benefit of the little circle of onlooking workmen that Ballard bent to the saddle-horn while Fitzpatrick was buckling the rifle-holster in place.

"What is it, Bourke?" he asked quietly.

"More of the same," returned the contractor, matching the low tone of the inquiry. "Craigmiles has got his spies in every camp, and you're probably spotted, same as old man Macpherson used to be when he rode the work. If that cussed Mexican foreman does be getting wind of this, and shy a guess at why you're heading for Jack's Cabin and the railroad in the dead o' night – "

Ballard's exclamation was impatient.

"This thing has got on your digestion, Bourke," he said, rallying the big contractor. "Up at the Elbow Canyon camp it's a hoodoo bogey, and down here it's the Craigmiles cow-boys. Keep your shirt on, and we'll stop it – stop it short." Then, lowering his voice again: "Is the boy trustworthy?"

Fitzpatrick's shrug was more French than Irish.

"He can show you the trail; and he hates the Craigmiles outfit as the devil hates holy water. His father was a 'rustler,' and the colonel got him sent over the road for cattle-stealing. Dick comes of pretty tough stock, but I guess he'll do you right."

Ballard nodded, found his seat in the saddle, and gave the word.

"Pitch out, Dick," he commanded; and the small cavalcade of three skirted the circle of tents and shacks to take the westward trail in single file, the water-boy riding in advance and the Forestry man bringing up the rear.

In this order the three passed the scene of the assisted land-slide, where the acrid fumes of the dynamite were still hanging in the air, and came upon ground new to Bigelow and practically so to Ballard. For a mile or more the canal line hugged the shoulders of the foothills, doubling and reversing until only the steadily rising sky-line of the Elks gave evidence of its progress westward.

As in its earlier half, the night was still and cloudless, and the stars burned with the white lustre of the high altitudes, swinging slowly to the winding course in their huge inverted bowl of velvety blackness. From camp to camp on the canal grade there was desertion absolute; and even Bigelow, with ears attuned to the alarm sounds of the wilds, had heard nothing when the cavalcade came abruptly upon Riley's camp, the outpost of the ditch-diggers.

At Riley's they found only the horse-watchers awake. From these they learned that the distant booming of the explosions had aroused only a few of the lightest sleepers. Ballard made inquiry pointing to the Craigmiles riders. Had any of them been seen in the vicinity of the outpost camp?

"Not since sundown," was the horse-watcher's answer. "About an hour before candle-lightin', two of 'em went ridin' along up-river, drivin' a little bunch o' cattle."

The engineer gathered rein and was about to pull his horse once more into the westward trail, when the boy guide put in his word.

"Somebody's taggin' us, all right, if that's what you're aimin' to find out," he said, quite coolly.

Ballard started. "What's that?" he demanded. "How do you know?"

"Been listenin' – when you-all didn't make so much noise that I couldn't," was the calm rejoinder. "There's two of 'em, and they struck in just after we passed the dynamite heave-down."

Ballard bent his head and listened. "I don't hear anything," he objected.

"Nachelly," said the boy. "They-all ain't sech tenderfoots as to keep on comin' when we've stopped. Want to dodge 'em?"

"There's no question about that," was the mandatory reply.

The sober-faced lad took a leaf out of the book of the past – his own or his cattle-stealing father's.

"We got to stampede your stock a few lines, Pete," he said, shortly, to the horse-watcher who had answered Ballard's inquiry. "Get up and pull your picket-pins."

"Is that right, Mr. Ballard?" asked the man.

"It is if Dick says so. I'll back his orders."

The boy gave the orders tersely after the horse-guard had risen and kicked his two companions awake. The night herdsmen were to pick and saddle their own mounts, and to pull the picket-pins for the grazing mule drove. While this was doing, the small plotter vouchsafed the necessary word of explanation to Ballard and Bigelow.

"We ride into the bunch and stampede it, headin' it along the trail the way we're goin'. After we've done made noise enough and tracks enough, and gone far enough to make them fellers lose the sound of us that they've been follerin', we cut out of the crowd and make our little pasear down canyon, and the herd-riders can chase out and round up their stock again: see?"

Ballard made the sign of acquiescence; and presently the thing was done substantially as the boy had planned. The grazing mules, startled by the sudden dash of the three mounted broncos among them, and helped along by a few judicious quirt blows, broke and ran in frightened panic, carrying the three riders in the thick of the rout.

Young Carson, skilful as the son of the convict stock-lifter had been trained to be, deftly herded the thundering stampede in the desired direction; and at the end of a galloping mile abruptly gave the shrill yell of command to the two men whom he was piloting. There was a swerve aside out of the pounding melée, a dash for an opening between the swelling foothills, and the ruck of snorting mules swept on in a broad circle that would later make recapture by the night herders a simple matter of gathering up the trailing picket-ropes.

The three riders drew rein in the shelter of the arroyo gulch to breathe their horses, and Ballard gave the boy due credit.

"That was very neatly done, Dick," he said, when the thunder of the pounding hoofs had died away in the up-river distances. "Is it going to bump those fellows off of our trail?"

The water-boy was humped over the horn of his saddle as if he had found a stomach-ache in the breathless gallop. But he was merely listening.

"I ain't reskin' any money on it," he qualified. "If them cow-punch's 've caught on to where you're goin', and what you're goin' fer– "

Out of the stillness filling the hill-gorge like a black sea of silence came a measured thudding of hoofs and an unmistakable squeaking of saddle leather. Like a flash the boy was afoot and reaching under his bronco's belly for a tripping hold on the horse's forefoot. "Down! and pitch the cayuses!" he quavered stridently; and as the three horses rolled in the dry sand of the arroyo bed with their late riders flattened upon their heads, the inner darkness of the gorge spat fire and there was a fine singing whine of bullets overhead.

XII

THE RUSTLERS

In defiance of all the laws of precedence, it was the guest who first rose to the demands of the spiteful occasion. While Ballard was still struggling with the holster strappings of his rifle, Bigelow had disengaged his weapon and was industriously pumping a rapid-fire volley into the flame-spitting darkness of the gorge.

The effect of the prompt reply in kind was quickly made manifest. The firing ceased as abruptly as it had begun, a riderless horse dashed snorting down the bed of the dry arroyo, narrowly missing a stumbling collision with the living obstructions lying in his way, and other gallopings were heard withdrawing into the hill-shadowed obscurities.

It was Ballard who took the water-boy to task when they had waited long enough to be measurably certain that the attackers had left the field.

"You were mistaken, Dick," he said, breaking the strained silence. "There were more than two of them."

Young Carson was getting his horse up, and he appeared to be curiously at fault.

"You're plumb right, Cap'n Ballard," he admitted. "But that ain't what's pinchin' me: there's always enough of 'em night-herdin' this end of the range so 'at they could have picked up another hand 'r two. What I cayn't tumble to is how they-all out-rid us."

"To get ahead of us, you mean?"

"That's it. We're in the neck of a little hogback draw that goes on down to the big canyon. The only other trail into the draw is along by the river and up this-a-way – 'bout a mile and a half furder 'n the road we come, I reckon."

It was the persistent element of mystery once more thrusting itself into the prosaic field of the industries; but before Ballard could grapple with it, the fighting guest cut in quietly.

"One of their bullets seems to have nipped me in the arm," he said, admitting the fact half reluctantly and as if it were something to be ashamed of. "Will you help me tie it up?"

Ballard came out of the speculative fog with a bound.

"Good heavens, Bigelow! are you hit? Why didn't you say something?" he exclaimed, diving into the pockets of his duck coat for matches and a candle-end.

"It wasn't worth while; it's only a scratch, I guess."

But the lighted candle-end proved it to be something more; a ragged furrow plowed diagonally across the forearm. Ballard dressed it as well as he could, the water-boy holding the candle, and when the rough job of surgery was done, was for sending the Forestry man back to the valley head and Castle 'Cadia with the wound for a sufficient reason. But Bigelow developed a sudden vein of stubbornness. He would neither go back alone, nor would he consent to be escorted.

"A little thing like this is all in the day's work," he protested. "We'll go on, when you're ready; or, rather, we'll go and hunt for the owner of that horse whose saddle I suppose I must have emptied. I'm just vindictive enough to hope that its rider was the fellow who pinked me."

As it happened, the hope was to be neither confirmed nor positively denied. A little farther up the dry arroyo the candle-end, sputtering to its extinction, showed them a confusion of hoof tramplings in the yielding sand, but nothing more. Dead or wounded, the horse-losing rider had evidently been carried off by his companions.

"Which proves pretty conclusively that there must have been more than two," was Ballard's deduction, when they were again pushing cautiously down the inner valley toward its junction with the great canyon. "But why should two, or a dozen of them, fire on us in the dark? How could they know whether we were friends or enemies?"

Bigelow's quiet laugh had a touch of grimness in it.

"Your Elbow Canyon mysteries have broken bounds," he suggested. "Your staff should include an expert psychologist, Mr. Ballard."

Ballard's reply was belligerent. "If we had one, I'd swap him for a section of mounted police," he declared; and beyond that the narrow trail in the cliff-walled gorge of the Boiling Water forbade conversation.

Three hours farther down the river trail, when the summer dawn was paling the stars in the narrow strip of sky overhead, the perpendicular walls of the great canyon gave back a little, and looking past the water-boy guide, Ballard saw an opening marking the entrance of a small tributary stream from the north; a little green oasis in the vast desert of frowning cliffs and tumbled boulders, with a log cabin and a tiny corral nestling under the portal rock of the smaller stream.

"Hello!" said Bigelow, breaking the silence in which they had been riding for the greater part of the three hours, "what's this we are coming to?"

Ballard was about to pass the query on to the boy when an armed man in the flapped hat and overalls of a range rider stepped from behind a boulder and barred the way. There was a halt, an exchange of words between young Carson and the flap-hatted trail-watcher in tones so low as to be inaudible to the others, and the armed one faced about, rather reluctantly, it seemed, to lead the way to the cabin under the cliff.

At the dismounting before the cabin door, the boy cleared away a little of the mystery.

"This yere is whar I live when I'm at home," he drawled, lapsing by the influence of the propinquity into the Tennessee idiom which was his birthright. "Pap'll get ye your breakfas' while I'm feedin' the bronc's."

Ballard glanced quickly at his guest and met the return glance of complete intelligence in the steady gray eyes of the Forestry man. The cabin and the corral in the secluded canyon were sufficiently accounted for. But one use could be made of a stock enclosure in such an inaccessible mountain fastness. The trail station in the heart of the Boiling Water wilderness was doubtless the headquarters of the "rustlers" who lived by preying upon the King of Arcadia's flocks and herds.

"Your allies in the little war against Colonel Craigmiles," said Bigelow, and there was something like a touch of mild reproach in his low tone when he added: "Misery isn't the only thing that 'acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.'"

"Apparently not," said Ballard; and they went together into the kitchen half of the cabin which was built, in true Tennessee fashion, as "two pens and a passage."

The welcome accorded them by the sullen-faced man who was already frying rashers of bacon over the open fire on the hearth was not especially cordial. "Mek' ye an arm and re'ch for yerselves," was his sole phrase of hospitality, when the bacon and pan-bread were smoking on the huge hewn slab which served for a table; and he neither ate with his guests nor waited upon them, save to refill the tin coffee cups as they were emptied.

Neither of the two young men stayed longer than they were obliged to in the dirty, leather-smelling kitchen. There was freedom outside, with the morning world of fresh, zestful immensities for a smoking-room; and when they had eaten, they went to sit on a flat rock by the side of the little stream to fill and light their pipes, Ballard crumbling the cut-plug and stoppering the pipe for his crippled companion.

"How is the bullet-gouge by this time?" he questioned, when the tobacco was alight.

"It's pretty sore, and no mistake," Bigelow acknowledged frankly. Whereupon Ballard insisted upon taking the bandages off and re-dressing the wound, with the crystal-clear, icy water of the mountain stream for its cleansing.

"It was a sheer piece of idiocy on my part – letting you come on with me after you got this," was his verdict, when he had a daylight sight of the bullet score. "But I don't mean to be idiotic twice in the same day," he went on. "You're going to stay right here and keep quiet until we come along back and pick you up, late this afternoon."

Bigelow made a wry face.

"Nice, cheerful prospect," he commented. "The elder cattle thief isn't precisely one's ideal of the jovial host. By the way, what was the matter with him while we were eating breakfast? He looked and acted as if there were a sick child in some one of the dark corners which he was afraid we might disturb."

Ballard nodded. "I was wondering if you remarked it. Did you hear the sick baby?"

"I heard noises – besides those that Carson was so carefully making with the skillet and the tin plates. The room across the passage from us wasn't empty."

"That was my guess," rejoined Ballard, pulling thoughtfully at his short pipe. "I heard voices and tramplings, and, once in a while, something that sounded remarkably like a groan – or an oath."

Bigelow nodded in his turn. "More of the mysteries, you'd say; but this time they don't especially concern us. Have you fully made up your mind to leave me here while you go on down to the railroad? Because if you have, you and the boy will have to compel my welcome from the old robber: I'd never have the face to ask him for a whole day's hospitality."

"I'll fix that," said Ballard, and when the boy came from the corral with the saddled horses, he went to do it, leaving Bigelow to finish his pipe on the flat rock of conference.

The "fixing" was not accomplished without some difficulty, as it appeared to the young man sitting on the flat stone at the stream side. Dick brought his father to the door, and Ballard did the talking – considerably more of it than might have been deemed necessary for the simple request to be proffered. At the end of the talk, Ballard came back to the flat stone.

"You stay," he said briefly to Bigelow. "Carson will give you your dinner. But he says he has a sick man on his hands in the cabin, and you'll have to excuse him."

"He was willing?" queried Bigelow.

"No; he wasn't at all willing. He acted as if he were a loaded camel, and your staying was going to be the final back-breaking straw. But he's a Tennessean, and we've been kind to his boy. The ranch is yours for the day, only if I were you, I shouldn't make too free use of it."

Bigelow smiled.

"I'll be 'meachum' and keep fair in the middle of the road. I don't know anything that a prosecuting attorney could make use of against the man who has given me my breakfast, and who promises to give me my dinner, and I don't want to know anything. Please don't waste any more daylight on me: Dick has the horses ready, and he is evidently growing anxious."

Ballard left the Forestry man smoking and sunning himself on the flat boulder when he took the down-canyon trail with the sober-faced boy for his file leader, and more than once during the rather strenuous day to which the pocket-gulch incident was the introduction, his thoughts went back to Bigelow, marooned in the depths of the great canyon with the saturnine cattle thief, the sick man, and doubtless other members of the band of "rustlers."

It was therefore, with no uncertain feeling of relief that he returned in the late afternoon at the head of a file of as hard-looking miscreants as ever were gathered in a sheriff's posse, and found Bigelow sitting on the step of the Carson cabin, still nursing the bandaged arm, and still smoking the pipe of patience.

"I'm left to do the honours, gentlemen," said the Forestry man, rising and smiling quaintly. "The owner of the ranch regrets to say that he has been unavoidably called away; but the feed in the corral and the provisions in the kitchen are yours for the taking and the cooking."

The sheriff, a burly giant whose face, figure, garmenting and graceful saddle-seat proclaimed the ex-cattleman, laughed appreciatively.

"Bat Carson knows a healthy climate as far as he can see the sun a-shinin'," he chuckled; and then to his deputies: "Light down, boys, and we'll see what sort o' chuck he's left for us."

In the dismounting Ballard drew Bigelow aside. "What has happened?" he asked.

"You can prove nothing by me," returned Bigelow, half quizzically. "I've been asleep most of the day. When I woke up, an hour or so ago, the doors were open and the cabin was empty. Also, there was a misspelled note charcoaled on a box-cover in the kitchen, making us free of the horse-bait and the provisions. Also, again, a small bunch of cattle that I had seen grazing in a little park up the creek had disappeared."

"Um," said Ballard, discontentedly. "All of which makes us accessories after the fact in another raid on Colonel Craigmiles's range herd. I don't like that."

"Nor do I," Bigelow agreed. "But you can't eat a man's bread, and then stay awake to see which way he escapes. I'm rather glad I was sleepy enough not to be tempted. Which reminds me: you must be about all in on that score yourself, Mr. Ballard."

"I? Oh, no; I got in five or six hours on the railroad train, going and coming between Jack's Cabin and the county seat."

The posse members were tramping into the kitchen to ransack it for food and drink, and Bigelow stood still farther aside.

"You managed to gather up a beautiful lot of cutthroats in the short time at your disposal," he remarked.

"Didn't I? And now you come against one of my weaknesses, Bigelow: I can't stay mad. Last night I thought I'd be glad to see a bunch of the colonel's cow-boys well hanged. To-day I'm sick and ashamed to be seen tagging this crew of hired sure-shots into the colonel's domain."

"Just keep on calling it the Arcadia Company's domain, and perhaps the feeling will wear off," suggested the Forestry man.

"It's no joke," said Ballard, crustily; and then he went in to take his chance of supper with the sheriff and his "sure-shots."

There was still sufficient daylight for the upper canyon passage when the rough-riders had eaten Carson out of house and home, and were mounted again for the ascent to the Kingdom of Arcadia. In the up-canyon climb, the sheriff kept the boy, Dick, within easy bridle clutch, remembering a certain other canyon faring in which the cattle thief's son had narrowly missed putting his father's captors, men and horses, into the torrent of the Boiling Water. Ballard and Bigelow rode ahead; and when the thunderous diapason of the river permitted, they talked.

"How did they manage to move the sick man?" asked Ballard, when the trail and the stream gave him leave.

"That is another of the things that I don't know; I'm a leather-bound edition of an encyclopædia when it comes to matters of real information," was the ironical answer. "But your guess of this morning was right; there was a sick man – sick or hurt some way. I took the liberty of investigating a little when I awoke and found the ranch deserted. The other room of the cabin was a perfect shambles."

"Blood?" queried the engineer; and Bigelow nodded.

"Blood everywhere."

"A falling-out among thieves, I suppose," said Ballard, half-absently; and again Bigelow said: "I don't know."

"The boy knows," was Ballard's comment. "He knew before he left the ranch this morning. I haven't been able to get a dozen words out of him all day."

Just here both stream-noise and trail-narrowing cut in to forbid further talk, and Bigelow drew back to let Ballard lead in the single-file progress along the edge of the torrent.

It was in this order that they came finally into the Arcadian grass-lands, through a portal as abrupt as a gigantic doorway. It was the hour of sunset for the high peaks of the Elk range, and the purple shadows were already gathering among the rounded hills of the hogback. Off to the left the two advanced riders of the posse cavalcade saw the evening kitchen-smoke of Riley's ditch-camp. On the hills to the right a few cattle were grazing unherded.

But two things in the prospect conspired to make Ballard draw rein so suddenly as to bring him awkwardly into collision with his follower. One was a glimpse of the Castle 'Cadia touring car trundling swiftly away to the eastward on the river road; and the other was a slight barrier of tree branches piled across the trail fairly under his horse's nose. Stuck upon a broken twig of the barrier was a sheet of paper; and there was still sufficient light to enable the chief engineer to read the type-written lines upon it when he dropped from the saddle.

"Mr. Ballard: " it ran. "You are about to commit an act of the crudest injustice. Take the advice of an anxious friend, and quench the fire of enmity before it gets beyond control."

There was no signature; and Ballard was still staring after the disappearing automobile when he mechanically passed the sheet of paper up to Bigelow. The Forestry man read the type-written note and glanced back at the sheriff's posse just emerging from the canyon portal.